The advent of document designs systems has increased productivity with respect to document creation and processing. For example, many conventional document design systems provide tools that enable individuals to create, edit, format, paginate, store, and share both physical and digital documents. Indeed, many conventional document design systems populate documents from import data obtained from outside sources. While conventional document design systems may provide increased productivity, there remain a number of drawbacks with conventional document design systems.
Generally, conventional document design systems are divided into two groups, text-based systems and free-form based systems. Text-based document design systems, such as a word-processing system, enable individuals to enter and edit large bodies of text. As text is entered, text-based document design systems enable text to flow continuously, automatically breaking at each page. Text-based document design systems, however, perform poorly with non-text input, such as data visualizations (e.g., charts, graphs, and images). For instance, text-based document design systems often apply text-based rules to data visualizations, which creates undesirable effects, such as moving data visualizations to unwanted locations within a document, overlapping data visualizations with and text/other data visualizations, and/or creating large unused space. Because many dynamic documents (e.g., auto-populated documents and document reports) are increasingly using more data visualizations, text-based document design systems are ill-suited for these types of documents.
Free-form document design systems enable individuals to manually position objects at select locations within a document as well as enable individuals to manually resize objects. As such, free-form document design systems are better suited to handle data visualizations. Free-form document design systems, however, require that objects be confined either to a single page or to a defined size of a particular data visualization. In other words, free-form document design systems do not allow for objects, such as data visualizations, to expand, resize, span multiple pages or other formatting issues based on a change in data associated with a data visualization. Rather, an individual must manually reduce the size of an object to fit on a single page. Alternatively, an individual using a free-form design system must manually cut a larger object into multiple pieces and place each piece on a separate page of the document.
These and other problems are compounded with the introduction of dynamic data visualizations, or data visualizations associated with data that automatically updates over time. In particular, as data associated with a data visualization updates, conventional document design systems, including text-based systems and free-form systems, are often ill-equipped to appropriately visualize the updated data within a well-designed and organized document. Due to the drawbacks described above, each time a data visualization changes size in a document, an individual often has to manually update the paginated report to fix undesirable effects, such as overlapping objects or large unused spaces in the document.
As explained above, conventional document design systems lack the sophistication and computer intelligence to automatically update and create a document design. Thus, conventional systems rely on manual editing of documents each time data associated with the documents changes. Because in some instances data is updated in real-time, computer generated documents often require significant time in manually updating the documents, reposting of documents, presenting of documents, and other manual tasks associated with data visualizations that dynamically update.
Accordingly, there are a number of considerations to be made in generating, updating, and optimizing documents and document designs and formatting associated with dynamic data visualizations.